The term "medical sharps" generally is defined as medical instruments having a sharp cutting edge or a Sharp point. In the medical environment, sharps comprise hypodermic needle syringes, scalpel blades, and the like. After use, medical sharps are considered contaminated wastes and must be disposed of. Other contaminated medical wastes, including chemo-therapy, pathological and dental wastes, comprise surgical tubing, washcloths, surgical gloves, masks, garments, drapes, cultures of infectious agents, and the like. Additionally, other types of wastes include surgical "kit packs" for performing specific surgical procedures, whereby after use in an operation, such kit packs are considered contaminated wastes. After use, medical sharps and other contaminated medical wastes must be safely collected and disposed of without creating a hazard for the hospital personnel, patients, or visitors of a medical care facility, or for members of the family when used in the home.
Typically in the home environment, medical wastes such as expired medication, medical gauze, and medical tape are discarded in a regular household trash can. However, in situations where the patient receives medical injections away from the medical care facility, such as a diabetic patient who must monitor his or her blood sugar level and then administer self-injections of insulin, the used insulin needle syringes must be safely disposed of so as to avoid presenting a hazard to other members of the family or community. Also, other diseases and medical procedures require the frequent use of needle syringes in the home. Presently, none of the known prior art discloses a collector or receptor for safely discarding contaminated or hazardous medical wastes such as insulin syringes of a diabetic patient in a home environment.
When medical sharps or surgical "kit packs" are being used in a hospital, typically the hospital protocol is to use and immediately dispose of these medical wastes in receptacles, such as in plastic, wall-mounted receptacles or in large receptors placed on the floor having an open top, otherwise known as "kick buckets". Typically the medical waste receptacles are placed in strategic locations throughout the hospital or other medical treatment facility, such as in the patient's rooms, in the hall outside the patient's room, in treatment rooms, operating rooms, and emergency rooms, so as to be available for receiving the medical wastes immediately and conveniently after use by the nurse, physician, or other medical personnel. Additionally, the kick buckets are generally placed in operating rooms and emergency rooms for receiving large volumes of various types of medical wastes. The receptacles must be suitably sized and shaped to receive the anticipated amount of medical waste over a period of time, depending on the protocol of the medical facility, and the receptacles must easily receive yet securely and safely retain the medical waste so as to avoid presenting a hazard to children or to disoriented patients or to curious visitors.
After these receptacles are filled with medical wastes, they are collected for disposal, usually for burning in an incinerator. The collection procedure usually requires housekeeping personnel to move about the hospital with a plastic bag or other relatively large container and to place the filled receptacles in the bag, and to replace the used receptacles with new empty receptacles, for example by dismounting the used plastic receptacles from their wall brackets and mounting the new receptacles in the wall brackets. After replacement and collection of the medical waste receptacles, the collected receptacles are securely packaged in a larger container such as a plastic bag or cardboard box and the bag or box is transported to a burn facility.
During the containment and collection procedure of medical wastes, there is the hazard that the medical waste materials will contaminate the personnel who are handling or are exposed to the wastes. Experience demonstrates that accidents caused by the medical waste materials through skin scratch or puncture and other exposure are occasional causes of injury to personnel and such accidents are a considerable expense to hospitals and insurance companies.
For example, when the used receptacles that are filled with medical wastes are being removed from their holders or being transported, the needle of a syringe can protrude from or escape from its individual receptacle and scratch or puncture the personnel handling the receptacle.
Therefore, it is highly desirable that the use-and-dispose method provides for safe containment and collection of the medical sharps and other wastes within the home and the hospital environment by providing a collector which is puncture resistant and leak resistant.
Another problem can be created during disposal of the medical wastes. The usual method of disposal is incineration, whereby the medical wastes are converted into ash for delivery to a landfill, etc. The disposal systems for the medical wastes range from on-site incinerators to contract disposal services which transport the medical wastes to off-site burn facilities. Generally, the treatment plants incinerate the collectors and the medical wastes contained in the collectors and then bury the residue of the burned medical wastes and collectors in a landfill.
An incineration technique is especially advantageous for disintegrating contaminated sharps and other pathological wastes, because incineration has the ability to convert the contaminated substances into a non-contaminated ash. However, when certain materials such as plastics of a syringe are burned, ashes from the incineration of these materials can become a partially pyrolized plastic residue, which is essentially a tar ash or residue which .when buried in a landfill, is non-biodegradable waste. Although the ashes of plastic syringes and some other types of plastic wastes will be delivered to landfills, it is highly desirable to avoid the use of plastic collectors for these wastes, because when plastic collectors are burned they can emit toxic gases to the atmosphere and create even more non-biodegradable ash, which is an undesirable additive to a landfill.
Thus, it would be advantageous to provide a disposable collector system for collecting and disposing of medical sharps and other medical wastes which is safe and efficient to use, which can be specifically constructed in a small size for home use by a diabetic, or which can be constructed in larger sizes for use in the offices of physicians and medical care facilities, and which can be incinerated without the evolution of substantial toxic gases emitted from the collector and which when burned aids in rendering the wastes.
It also would be desirable to fabricate the collector of a combustible material that yields substantially only biodegradable ash upon incineration and to adjust the mass of the collector with respect to the anticipated mass of the wastes to be collected in the collector so as to control the worst case ratio of plastic, nonbiodegradable ash to cellulosic, biodegradable ash.
Further, it would be desirable that contaminated medical wastes be accounted for when being burned, so that the person or medical care facility that generated the waste material receives confirmation that the wastes were delivered to the waste incineration site for proper disposal.